Edward
De Vere's Concealed Authorship
of the Shakespeare Canon
and the Necessary Taboos of Blind Belief

The
Problem

The
weakening of the Stratford myth in English literary scholarship
presents us with a stirring history of the power of mythology over
the minds of, putatively, the primary force for logical inquiry
in Western discourse, the academic establishment.

Looked at through the political lens, though, and focussing on the
utter dependence of the Academy upon the manners, values, and material
support of the dominant political class, it becomes much easier to
understand why the myth of Everyman striding along the road to London
with the greatest vision of existence since Sophocles in his eyes would
beguile contradiction and warm all hearts, including the scholar's.

Ralph
Waldo Emerson recognized the snares and pits before the American
scholar as inherent in the personality-set itself:

Whoever looks
at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable
parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked
the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes
the main business of their life. If we go into a library or
newsroom we see the same function on a higher plane, performed
with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption indicating
the sweetness of the act. ('Quotation and Originality')

He proceeded,
in 'The American Scholar', to hope for the time when "...the
sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its
iron eyelids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world
with something better than the exercise of mechanical skill."

It is simply
clan instinct to believe and cogitate in terms that are acceptable,
to fit in, to feed and run with the herd, to sniff which way
the wind is blowing, sense what direction the closest hooves
are shifting, as it is very often a matter of personal advantage
and survival. Rebellion can be fatal to iconoclasts. On the other
hand, clay pots crack and crash on their own after a time.

In the case of
the Shakespeare authorship question, such is the documentation
contradicting a literary life for Shakspere and such was the
expedient and then posthumous anonymity on the part of Edward
De Vere, whose language, life, and station correspond intimately
with the Shakespeare Canon that, after centuries of frauds, subterfuge,
and political excisions, now a kind of brittle dismissiveness
appears to be the defense of the prevailing but weakly evidenced
narrative.

The academic
refusal to debate who "Shakespeare" actually was, on evidentiary
grounds, exhibits the ultimate, the atom bomb, of early childhood
resistence, denial. Granted the stakes in terms of professional
status are high, should the strategy of resistance fail. We need
hardly mention economic ramifications, for instance adjustments
in the Stratford-on-Avon industry, long ago typed lectures that
must be abandoned, and revised historical texts if the De Vere
paradigm gains credence. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult
to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
upon his not understanding."

For mainly non-academic
researchers to deal with so powerful a set of social entrenchments
amounts to reversing De Vere's politically necessary concealments,
by openly but equably flooding discussion with the factual truth,
and trusting in Schopenhauer's dictum, “All truth passes through
three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently
opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

The Approach

T.S. Eliot described
the Sonnets in a single sentence: "This autobiography is written
by a foreign man in a foreign tongue, which can never be translated." A.L.
Rowse added that the Sonnets "offer us the greatest puzzle in
the history of English literature." Since the Sonnets are the
bare thoughts of a Renaissance genius appealing to his lord with
all the art and wisdom in his being, they are a path to his soul
and circumstances. The concealment that seems to be inherent,
almost a source of protective pride underlying these poems, calls
for some key to think about them. Eliot and Rowse effectively
gave up and substituted near worship for inquiry.

First, what grasp
can we get on the Sonnets' language? The masterful language seems
to come out of nowhere in Tudor England. One is reminded of Romano's
painting of Achilles, face hidden by his throwing-arm, as he
raises a spear aloft to strike. Each and every poem is an argument
posed and resolved, but implicit in each is the ability to communicate
both on the surface and secretly simultaneously, without revealing
either source or subject. The tensing spear in the painting may
have inspired De Vere to use that very term, shake-spear, to
mask his identity like Achilles as he forged and flung the language
of his race. (See Michael Delahoyde, "De Vere's 'Lucrece' and
Romano's 'Sala di Troia'" ,The Oxfordian/9, 2006, p. 58)

Secondly, if
De Vere pursued a strategy to mask his work behind others, the
willing personae of the admiring and sympathetic--and that was
the practice for the literary aristocracy to reach and educate
the masses--there must have been a supportive culture of concealment
and, if they existed at all, few and sly references to the true
author. In fact there are discreet contemporary references attesting
to the magnitude of the figure behind "Shakespeare". Contrarily,
extant official papers from that time record only negative reference
to De Vere, a disjunction that should be glaring to scholarship,
given his pre-eminence in the realm. Why was he political trouble?
The Sonnets should portray the context and explain, unless they
are pure fiction. Our instincts tell us nothing that anguished
can be fiction.

Third, since
the Stratford Monument, the Sonnets dedication, and Jonson's
introductory verse to the First Folio all contain a code that
contradicts the Shakspere authorship propounded on the surface,
we must infer a strategy to expediently conceal but ultimately
reveal De Vere as the author of his work--why then did the De
Vere circle's political cunning fail to succeed?

We take these
themes in turn.

Concealment
and Marginalization of the Sonnets

It is a logical
certainly that Shakspere, who would have been less than thirty
when the Sonnets became current in the early 1590's, could not
instruct a seventeen-year-old noble with the words:

However
Edward De Vere, whose intimate relations with Queen Elizabeth
I were the talk and tattle of the aristocracy in 1573-5, and
eventually the pitiful subject of Sonnet 33 as well as the non
sequitur statement in 'The Merchant of Venice' ["The truth
will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may,
but at the length truth will out."], well could have fathered
Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who resembled him
and Elizabeth closely, and bore no resemblance to Mary Browne
and the Second Earl of Southampton.

So
at the outset, De Vere's poems to Wriothesley make sense to me
as the private advice of a loving but desperate father who knew
his son, though illegitimate, stood the best chance to succeed
Elizabeth in the Tudor lineage if he married her trusted Secretary's
grand-daughter. The first group of Sonnets, up to Sonnet 26,
unify around his father's--a loving vassal's--advice. The paradoxically
devoted but familiar homage throughout this work is consistent
and unmistakable.

The
hardest puzzle to unlock in the early section is Sonnet 20, retailed
as carnal worship in the later literature and de-emphasized for
that reason.

A
woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

For
the first time the author mentions the youth's parents (except
Sonnet 3's figure, "thy mother's glass"). Here the tone is intensely
personal. In the subterranean code of the Sonnets, the noble
refers to his "mistress", a female superior in rank. To the highest
ranked noble in the aristocracy that can be only Elizabeth. She
is also "a woman" who mothered the youth. That mysterious term "a
woman" repeats throughout, a personage too elevated for naming.
His subject, the youth, is his "master-mistress", inferring that
he also must be royalty, the only rank superior to the writer's
and integrally made of the "mistress". In the language of the
time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "my passion" refers
to an epic inner struggle, akin to Christ's in his last days,
not sexual abandon. The next lines describe the charismatic quality
of the youth, even to the point of demi-godliness. Again he writes
of "a woman" for whom the nascent child was created, but Nature
erred in making him the father, who is then deprived ("defeated")
of his fatherhood, because he is not King, in truth is punished
for his carnality. But the resolution of the Sonnet's argument
is in the last two lines. Since the youth was targetted ("pricked-out" being
an archery term), i.e., fated, for siring heirs, De Vere's love
carries forth through him into their future line.

The
explicated poem looks far different from the first fresh impression,
taking into account the royal frame of reference and the words'
16th Century connotations. A puzzling lover's complaint turns
into stunning revelation. If we do not have the context, and
comprehend the central metaphors, of the writer, we do not see
into the code he uses to communicate important information. It
was all too easy therefore to marginalize the Sonnets and relegate
them to the steaming teapot and armchair set of the literary
community. At the same time, once the code is clear we immediately
absorb the enormity of political consequence, as the philosopher-poet,
right out of Castiglione's 'The Book of the Courtier', counsels
a future King.

Let
us move to Sonnet 76, which as the mid-point in Hank Whittemore's
schema, should be the critical expression of the entire work.
It is the anguished writing of the poet drained of inspiration.
He cannot say anything; the Muse has left him. "Why is my verse
so barren of new pride, so far from variation or quick change?" The
next question repeats the concern of the first. But the third
contains the code. "Why write I still all one, ever the same,
and keep invention in a noted weed [or form], That every word
doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth, and where they
did proceed?" One senses he fears he is telling too much. "All
For One" is part of Wriothesley's motto. "Ever the Same" is Elizabeth's. "Ever",
De Vere's ancestral identity and personal star of constancy,
is embedded in Elizabeth's motto. His "sun" in the poem is homonymously
his own son, to whom he will ever be faithful, the basic meaning
in the Sonnets' code of the word "love". "Word" is another charged
expression, rising almost to heraldic meaning, since Word is
immortal, matching in verse the anagramic Ever/Vere that was
his name and resolve. (John Dover Wilson referenced in Roger
Stritmatter's 'Hamlet's Aletheia'). "Every word doth
almost tell my name". Sonnet 76:

Why
is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

I
came to these thoughts myself before having the opportunity to
read Whittemore's 'The Monument' and I must admit that I have
not read it thoroughly or confirmed its aesthetic schema and
nomenclature of meanings. But I attest that there have been several
intellectual stages in the emergence of a just interpretation
of the authorship question before us. The first was J. Thomas
Looney's book. The second was in no particular order the scholarship
of B.M. Ward, Eva Turner Clark, and Charles Wisner Barrell. The
third was the two-generation efforts of the Ogburn family concurrent
with that of Ruth Loyd Miller's and of William Plumer Fowler.
The fourth was the amassed discovery contained in Roger A. Stritmatter's
'Edward De Vere's Geneva Bible'. The fifth and presently last
is 'The Monument' by Whittemore. His historical approach opens
up new doors of perception that have transformed and stimulated
thought about the Shakespeare issue. In recent linguistic research,
Joseph Sobrans and co-authors Brame and Popova have advanced
Fowler's thousands of phrase-to-phrase identities between De
Vere and "Shakespeare". Over the past twenty years, intriguing
similarities have multiplied up to overwhelming corroboration.

The
Oxfordian extra-Academy research is the most wholesome in the
field ever, the most credible and sensible to the facts, and
the pioneering authors have paid the price, emotionally and literally,
without any significant support from established institutions.
Yet it has been a boon that most are NOT supported scholars,
because the Arthur Conan Doyle style of inquiry is best unencumbered
by tradition.

This
brief discussion suggests the Sonnets have a substrata of meaning
below the seeming love odes and meditations comprising the text.
That the text was beyond the amatory, is indicated by the authorities
suppressing publication after the first printing in 1609. "Shakespeare" was
broadly and prolifically popular. But the Crown controlled publication,
and any shadow upon the legitimacy of King James I's succession
could and would not be tolerated. For three generations no further
edition existed. By that time, Robert Cecil's raison d'etat had
triumphed and the rough places were made smooth. Once he had
achieved power, suppression of the De Vere problem simply consolidated
it. Legitimacy of the Stuart line carries forward to the present,
no matter the details. The only clues to who might or should
have been King remained in the Sonnets' language, in the oddly
worded dedication page of the Sonnets, and in the memory of those
who admired the man whom James I himself called The Great Oxford.
Beyond a sentence about the Essex Rebellion, Southampton and
his pedigree never appear in English history texts. But high
praises for De Vere lingered for about a generation after his
death, until the time, as in Thomas Hardy's "Immortality", they
faded to scraps and whispers. By the hand of Fate, some of them
survived to buttress a revised narrative of events.

Literary
Concealment as Cultural Survival

Fear
had been a natural reaction to the conditions of the Sixteenth
Century. Religious ferment had combined with the travail of national
centralization to make disorder a constant possibility and stability
a tenuous achievement. Society was continually being threatened
by a reversion to "political nature". (Sheldon Wolin, 'Politics
and Vision', Expanded Edition, 2004, p. 218)

Twenty
years after De Vere died, Richard Brathwait wrote, "Let me tell
you: London never saw writers more gifted than the ones I saw
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And never were there more
delightful plays than the ones performed by youth whose author
wrote under a borrowed name." ((language modernized by Mark Anderson,
'Shakespeare By Another Name', p. 368) Brathwait also honored
plays "Prettily shadowed in a borrowed name." ('Stappado For
the Devil')

Even
at that stage, naming the widely-known producer of adolescent-cast
theater companies, De Vere, was not safe. Similarly, in "Shake-speare's" halcyon
days, John Marston ('Scourge of Villanie', 1598) extremely discreetly
hailed the great writer with the recondite name: "Far fly thy
fame/ Most, most of me beloved, whose silent name / One letter
bounds..." Edward De Vere fits the encomium. A similar reverence
suffuses Richard Barnfield's 1598 tribute: "Live ever you, at
least in fame live ever;/ Well may the body die, but fame dies
never." The embedded use of the words "ever" and "never" speaks
both quietly and well.

Thomas
Heywood mentioned in 1612 the numerous fronts for De Vere, "W.S." among
them, and proclaimed "I must acknowledge my lines not worthy
his [the patron's]patronage." (Richard Whalen, 'Hierarchie',
Shakespeare Matters, Winter 2007,p. 30) It is not clear whether
he had collaborated with his patron, i.e., whether sponsorship
was De Vere's system for spreading his own work. Of this more
in a moment.

At
De Vere's death, his cousin Percival Golding wrote in almost
fearful language: "...I will only speak what all men's voices
confirm: he was a man in mind and body absolutely accomplished
with honorable endowments." This is indeed a modest description
of a mind who rewrote the English language and fashioned the
means for an even-if-temporarily unified English folk-soul. The
history plays of the 1580's helped galvanize the classes to defend
England from the Spanish threat.

In
1612 Henry Peacham wrote Minerva Britanna, a book of puzzles,
verbal and visual. As a clue to the author's choice of the British
Athena/Minerva, or literary deity, he produced a drawing of an
arm and hand holding a pen, thrust out from behind a theater
curtain. The hand has written in Latin on a slender scroll:"Mente
Videbori"/nearly "By the mind I will be seen". With the last
flourish of the pen, its shaft simulating an additional "I",
the basis for an anagram appears: "Tibi Nom. De Vere", translating
to "Thy name is De Vere". (Middlebury College student project
summarized in Mark Anderson website, July 2006) We must infer
that the literary circle of the time in London knew how to interpret
the point: De Vere had been the master. Had Shakspere been the "Shakespeare",
this tribute to De Vere would not have been published. Had however
such a tribute been published and directed TO Shakspere, who
was still alive, it would be hailed today as conclusive evidence
the Stratford grain dealer was the man depicted behind the curtain.
On reductio ad absurdum grounds, he cannot be so depicted
without cause. Present scholars can ignore the plain evidence
on this book board, but in so doing, they abandon their mission,
to seek truth and unmask falsehood.

For
a logical checkmate, we are entitled to search for equivalent
praise of the same literary giant in the 1580's, when Shakspere
was so young he could not have been the object. In 1586 William
Webbe ('Discourses on English Poetrie') wrote: "I may not omit
the deserved commendations of many honorable and noble Lords
and Gentlemen in her Majesty's Court, which in the rare devices
of poetry have been and yet are most skillful; among whom the
Right Honorable the Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the
title of the most excellent among the rest." This was duplicated
in 'The Art of English Poetrie' (1589) with the report: "...in
Her Majesty's time that now is sprung up another crew of Courtly
makers, Noblemen, and Gentlemen of Her Majesty's own servants,
who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their
doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which
number is first that noble gentleman, the Earl of Oxford." Even
after Shakspere had become associated with "Shakespeare", in
1598, Francis Meres wrote: "...the best for Comedy among us be
Edward Earl of Oxford,..." (all quotations from Michael Brame & Galina
Popova, 'Shakespeare's Fingerprints', p. 71)

Taking
up the supposition now that patronage by De Vere involved fronting
his writing, there are some remarkable similarities between the
works of "Shakespeare", De Vere, and quite a number of writers
named George: Gascoigne, Turbervile, Whetstone, Pettie, and Peele,
as well as Barnaby Googe and Arthur Brooke. The Brame/Popova
volume lists more names than one can believe. The point is that
certain complexes of phrases, used as integral to a writer's
style, usually don't carry over between writers. If they do,
one writer is copying, they are collaborating, or the implied "two" is
a fiction.

According to tradition, George Gascoigne wrote the poetry in this book.
If he didn't, and the comparison suggests he didn't, De Vere who produced
the book did. Otherwise "Shakespeare" the soul of the age copied the
minor writer Gascoigne.

Brooke:
As out of a plank a nail doth drive
So novel love out of the mind
The ancient love doth rive
Shakespeare (TG of V): As one nail by strength drives out another
So the remembrance of my former love
Is by a new object quite forgotten

Turbervile:
To quite all which good parts, this vow I make to thee:
I will be thine alone as long as I have power mine own to be
Shakespeare Sonnet 123: This I do vow and this shall ever be
I will be true despite thy scythe and thee

It
is yet more likely that De Vere's "collaboration" with his uncle
Arthur Golding on Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' was another blind:

Golding:
Even so have places oftentimes exchanged their estate
For I have seen it sea which was substantial ground alate
Again where sea was, I have seen the same become dry land
And shells and scales of seafish far have lyen from any strand
Shakespeare (Sonnet 64): When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage of the kingdom of the shore
And the firm soil win of the watery main
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store...

At
this point of demarcation, it may be impossible to know the truth
of all these connections. But something is answered: the charge
against De Vere (that his early poetry did not match the mature
Shakespeare works) has not taken into account the extensive foreground
of learning and skills evidenced by these mainly clandestine
efforts. As numerous volumes were dedicated to De Vere, it seems
entirely possible, for instance, that he had a hand in translating
'Cardanis Comforte', 'The Courtier', Ovid's 'Metamorphoses',
and other proxied works, as well as those plays that can be deduced
as his in whole or part. The entire culture, seething with religious
and factional strife, adopted secrecy as a form of self-defense,
not just one prestigious scion who was essentially a philosopher-artist
covertly committed to the stage. He above all knew of the "wolfish
earls" and "the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of
ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance..." (Walt
Whitman)

To
quote David Roper, "...[O]f course, this concealment has extended
through the ages, proliferated over time, and become the inherited
paradigm for every succeeding generation." ('The Great Oxford',
p. 149)

The
Failure of Political Cunning

Basically
our issue comes down to just that question, why didn't the truth
matter to succeeding generations? Some men knew the true author
of the Shakespeare Canon. When they died leaving little or no
record, the crosscurrent of events erased the already hidden
fact along with the rest of the English Renaissance. A reactionary
religious wave and the succession of weak kings brought on the
Cromwell Rebellion and civil war, ending in a bifurcation of
power. Conditions of peace did not resume until nearly the 18th
Century. What Althusius posited as the pluralistic nature of
any covenanted political entity, associative networks, happened
in the negative. Setting the example, the Cecils had spies everywhere
in all classes and sections of the land. A popular resistance
in 1623, led by De Vere's relations, sought to forestall the
planned Stuart intermarriage with Spain's monarchy. The plan
aborted, producing no satisfactory aftermath. Soon De Vere's
three sons were dead. Politically the House of Oxford vanished.
Subsequently, under James II the volatile status quo deteriorated
into religious/class conflict.

With
the resurgence of national spirit in the early 1700's, "Shakespeare",
i.e., the literary corpus, bequeathed to England a ready-made
heroic English past. Factual contradictions concerning the author
mattered less than the palpably brilliant writings themselves.
The zeitgeist of the age rather favored a mythos of sui generis art
springing whole, fully formed from the heart of the Anglo-Saxon
race, personified by their unheralded Colossus from the forests
of Arden. This in turn accorded with reasons of state.

At
a given point, the myth of the birth of the hero required some
plausible representation. But myth cannot also be truth. The
tale of the Stratford Monument describes typical fraud in pursuit
of regional and national prestiege. (See Richard F. Whalen, 'The
Stratford Bust: A Monumental Fraud', The Oxfordian/8, 2005).
By the 1800's the circus promoter P.T. Barnum got in the act,
trying to buy the biggest house in town in order to call it Shakespeare's
birthplace. The townspeople refused to sell and made another
house the post facto ancestral home. Mark Twain subsequently
wrote that the Stratford argument was like the museum dinosaur
made of "nine bones and the rest was plaster of Paris, 600 barrels
of it." .Judging from Charles Wisner Barrell's and Barbara Burris's
investigations into the De Vere paintings, someone both then
and now industriously scraped, cut, and patched the De Vere documentary
evidence into a vulgar semblance of the manufactured Shakspere
past.

Nevertheless
the primary hard evidence on the Shakespeare authorship question
still hides in plain sight today. The Stratford Monument inscription,
the Sonnets dedication page, and the Jonson introduction to the
First Folio contain a code of the time, decipherable by the Cardano
Grille. The decryptions are unambiguous, unique, and self-consistent.
They all identify the author "Shakspeare" [sic] as De Vere. By
use of Equidistant Letter Sequencing, both Dr. John Rollett and
D.L. Roper decoded the Sonnets dedication and Roper the Stratford
Monument inscription, respectively.

The
Cardano Grille, invented by the Italian mathematician and philosopher
Jerome Cardin (1501-1576), is a chart or table with drawn lines,
length and width, so as to place in one letter per square a contrived
benign sentence that reveals its secret message once the chart
shows vertical or diagonal verbal formations. English diplomacy
used it as a courier instrument. The literate were valuable participants
in the intelligence system. De Vere served as envoi to France
on occasion. He was surrounded by men employed in the government
secret service: Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, and George Turbervile
for example. Encryption served De Vere's circle when they perpetrated
the initial fraud that Shakspere, a former front, was the "Shake-speare" publically
marketed as the great playwright of the land.

On
the Stratford inscription, (<1623) once we transfer its text
to a Cardano Grille table of seven boxes vertically and thirty-four
horizontally, there is revealed one-half of a challenge and response.
The challenge is, "Him so test, I vow he is De Vere as he Shakspeare",
(signed) Name, I.B. [or Ben Jonson.] The confirming response
appears by translating the near meaningless Inscription phrase "Quick
Natvre Dide" into Latin. It translates to: Summa Velocium Rerum.
Take the first syllable of each word and combine to read: Sum
VeRe, or in English, I am Vere. I refer the reader to Roper's
website:

The Sonnets
dedication page (1609) is also a double-check system. The first check
is to employ a 6-2-2-2 selection pattern to the dedication words.
The counting leads to the following. Instead of the surface wording "To
the onlie begetter of these insving sonnets Mr.W.H. all happinesse
and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing
adventvrer in setting forth", we read: "These sonnets all by Ever
Poet the Forth" [De Vere and "deVierde" being near homonyms]. The rationale
for the 6-2-4 pattern is that "Edward De Vere" counted by letters
also totals to 12.

The second
check is an eight-by-nineteen Cardano Grille. The meaningful word
clusters are: "To Wriothesley his epigram W.S. [William Shakespeare?]
(signed) Vere." We can conclude the Sonnets were dedicated to Henry
Wriothesley if we combine the revealed information of the Cardano
Grille and the "only begetter, Mr. W.H." sequence in the surface
wording. W.H. are Wriothesley's initials reversed. Roper calculated
there were twenty-three chances in a trillion of randomly arriving
at that message. This is well beyond the practical needs of a l7th
Century encryption. They meant to communicate the subtext. It is
there.

The First
Folio introduction's decryption is my contribution. It has not been
endorsed by Mr. Roper. I work on the principle that Euclid invented
geometry but a high school student can complete a proof.

The Jonson
introductory poem to the First Folio (1623) displays contrived language,
facing an engraving that Sir George Greenwood characterized as "a
leering hydrocephalic idiot." It says:

To the
Reader:
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut
Wherein the Graver had a strife
With Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, reader, looke
Not on his picture, but his booke

Altogether
a strange bit of doggerel to introduce the most significant English
literature since Chaucer. However, when coded into a 13-by-22 chart,
there are more significant messages. In the sixth and seventh files
from the left side at both upper and lower ranks there are the decryptions: "Here
he E. Vere" and "He E. Vere". (In the orthography of the era, "v" and "u" were
equivalents.) Across the chart, in the last four files and eighth
to eleventh ranks, two messages appear. One is a series of "He"s
on either side of the word "Ever". The other is a combination of
the word "This" and a diagonal word "Veil". It can be construed to
read: "This is his veil". "Veil" crosses over the "Ever" formation.
The anagramic identity of "Ever" and "Vere" is featured throughout
the Sonnets.

Decryption
of Ben Jonson’s
Introductory Verse in the First Folio
(facing the Droushaut engraving of “Shakespeare”)

Equidistant
Letter Sequencing (ELS) or the Cardano Grille, named for its
inventor, was in use during the Elizabethan era for encryption
and decryption. This chart of 13 by 22 boxes, to total the number
of letters in Jonson’s introductory verse (286), reveals
three complexes of messages not obvious in the linear language.
The seventh file contains two versions of E. VERE, reading down
and reading up. (In Elizabethan-era orthography, the U and V
were equivalents.) The upper complex is embellished with several "HEs," the
lower has one horizontal frame of the pronoun. The far right
complex has another construction of VERE which the writer used
for anagramic purposes in his poetry, EVER. This in turn is surrounded
by constructions of "HEs". It is also characterized
by the legend: “THIS IS HIS VEIL” which overlays
the EVER figure. The purpose of the encrypted Jonson verse, under
these assumptions, can only be to identify the true author De
Vere, although an attempt has been made to retail the sham that “Shakespeare” wrote
the First Folio. This decryption agrees substantially with that
of the Stratford inscription solutions by Roper, and Rollett
and Roper in their work on the Sonnets Dedication page solution.
Vere is asserted as the author or “Shak(e)speare”.
This coding conveys that the introduction is Vere’s veil
from identity. It doubles as confirmation of the hidden truth.

What
we can analyze and solve in a few hours now is not recorded to
have been even attempted after De Vere and his constituency died.
The other shoe never made a sound. That doesn't mean they were
ignorant of the facts but rather that the political circumstances
and forces buried De Vere's rightful claim to the Shakespeare works.
During revolutionary Great Britain the family needed to survive
socially and financially.

The
following decades and centuries extolled political order, heroic
genius, military courage and exploration, a poor atmosphere in
which to assert the conscience of the race originated with a defiant
Earl in the Tudor aristocracy, who hid his authorship for a time
hereafter. The De Veres kept mum publically but nevertheless maintained
remnants of their prodigal son's life. In the October 1991 Atlantic
Monthly is recorded Sotheby's 1948 sale from De Vere's great-granddaughter's
(Henrietta Maria Stanley, Countess of Strafford) estate: Holinshed's
1587 'Chronicles'; 'The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting' (1575);
Castiglione's 'Il Cortegiano' (1563), an Italian edition which
De Vere sponsored to be translated into Latin; Hakluyt's 'Voyages';
and a copy–signed in the hand of Henry Wriothesley–of the Amyot
'Lives' of Plutarch. These were just such valued books, published
in his era, that Edward De Vere would have had in his library and
then passed on to his kin. Somehow the family kept them together
for 350 years.

I am
moved by the irony that Jerome Cardan, whose philosophy helped
guide De Vere's concept of facing death, which is clearly evident
in Hamlet's sleep soliloquy, also provided to the ages the graphic
means, his Cardano Grille encryption system, by which De Vere as
the author of the Shakespeare Canon can be vindicated, and his
name placed on the works at last, a literary immortality achieved
400 years after he said, as Hamlet, "things being thus unknown...draw
thy breath in pain to tell my story."

Conclusion

The
literary puzzle of the authorship of the Shakespeare Canon has
been collectively solved, solved at least on the merits of evidence
and comparative linguistic analysis. From our cursory discussion
here it is plain that the Sonnets contain loaded phrases, a prevailing
mood of deference and homage, and subject matter closely related
to the most highly placed individuals in the Elizabethan aristocracy.
The poetry also displays a style of concealment that characterized
other aspects of the literary production of Edward De Vere.

Remarkably
similar phrasing from disparate authors as shown above indicates
co-operation with his class inferiors in order to enable publishing
his own work, or perhaps to advance the English Renaissance through
proxies. Writers of the time covertly but sufficiently recognized
him as the giant among them.

Because
of politically explosive consequences, the evidence for his son
Henry Wriosthesley, Earl of Southampton, having rights to succeed
Elizabeth I never reached cultural credence--certainly not at the
time nor, due to unexamined documents and assumptions by the Academy
and perhaps reasons of state in Great Britain, in the centuries
since. The non-literary evidence, i.e., decodings of those dedicatory
and monument materials, sponsored by the De Vere family and friends
that were intrinsically attached to the name and work of "Shakespeare",
support the historical, biographical, and linguistic arguments.

Thus
the Oxford movement is facing, not differences in logical analysis,
but the inertia of institutionalized mythology. It is an emotionally-driven
dilemma. The entrenched Stratford position requires taking the
unproductive intellectual stance of no surrender in order not to
stand out from one's peers, even if a new point accords with logical
skepticism and factual examination. The next apostasy, expressing
interest in the Oxfordian position, would be tantamount to damaging
one's career. That is enough to make converts, like Galileo, "swear
against the thing they see;". (Sonnet 152)

We on
the other side of the table seek justice in the matter of De Vere
and the works of Shakespeare. And he himself left an example how
to achieve it. Justice is not vengeance. Justice means reformation.
In the course of time, Edward De Vere, a very great philosopher,
humbled himself and found that mercy is close to true justice or,
as he phrased it, justice likest God's. The idea is copiously expressed
in his work, particularly the later work and letters. I find echoes
of his style in the written appeal made by his son during the Essex
tribunals:

Remember
I pray your Lordships that the longest liver among men hath but
a short time of continuance, and that there is none so just upon
earth but hath a greater account to make to our creator for his
sins than any offender can have in this world. Believe that God
is better pleased with those that are the instruments of mercy
than with such as are the persuaders of severe justice, and forget
not that He hath promised mercy to the merciful.

It will be no slight
matter for ten thousand department professors to revise their respective
lifelong taboos, so necessary to supporting the Stratfordian assumptions
adopted rather uncritically if not unconsciously. There really
is something to allowing others to save face. Any one of us can
understand the defiant Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, who in General
Grant's apt remark about their exchange "just wants to be let down
easy."

De Vere extended
the ethic of mercy even to the animals, for example the distraught
deer heaving for breath and soon murdered. In the comprehension
of human justice and truth, he was well ahead of his time. Let
us resolve to be ahead of ours.

Methinks
the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retailed to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.

Prince
Edward, Richard III, (III,i)

Dedicated
to the memories of Ruth Loyd Miller, Minos D. Miller, Jr., and
William Plumer Fowler